under the ponderosas

Originally written 3/25/18

It's not science fiction, despite the flying cars and genetic engineering; it's not fantasy, despite the miracle child. It's political future history. With philosophical asides.

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I think Ada Palmer does consider this society a utopia; she's in love with it, in any case. I'm not. It makes me so deeply uncomfortable that I had to force myself to finish the book. Why?

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The setting is blurry, as I mentioned earlier, and the only people who care about land are a Hive called Mitsubishi, whose caring is based on ownership and rents. Plants appear once, in a gully everyone refers to as "the flower trench": could there be a more dismissive phrase? We don't hear about any mountains, nor valleys nor plains nor any feature of the landscape except the "trench" and a cave where Bridger hides sometimes. OK, the cave is well-described. I like it. But aside from Bridger in his hidey hole, the only people who are ever said to be outside are these Humanist parents who, we're told in passing, died in a whitewater rafting accident. Bridger animates a toy dog, and also in passing we're told about the pterodactyl and a robotic (I think) ferret-like thing, but otherwise, it's all humans, humans and more humans. People don't even eat animals; the only mention of a person eating flesh is a cannibal!

Why does the future contain only humans living indoors?

Is that actually today's reality?

I'm indoors right now. I've been indoors all day. I, living scarcely two miles from the national forest boundary, have not left the city limits in ten days.

Like I said: discomfort.

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My husband and son have gone to Canada for a ski trip. It's a ten-hour drive and they left comparatively late yesterday, so I'm not surprised they haven't called or texted yet; but there's a small chance something may have happened because my son is only sixteen — not an experienced driver — it's rational, really, that I checked on them with the Where's My iPhone app.

Is it rational, then, to dislike trackers so intensely?

The people in this future don't get upset when someone pings them any more than my husband did. They've had 300 years of peace, and have so conquered illness that the leading cause of death is suicide, and everyone knows this is the trackers' doing. They're glad when emergency services checks on them after detecting an adrenaline surge —

Everyone, that is, except Mycroft, because Mycroft's a criminal. A few other people in this novel are Bad but it's mostly abuse of power; our Mycroft, however, is evading detection. This makes Mycroft the only person with a reason to dislike trackers.

Did you get that? Mycroft is the only person in the world who takes off his tracker. And he's the only person in the world trying to undermine the government.

Everyone else is content to be monitored every second of every day because they always follow the rules.

Maybe they're good kids because they can join any government they want based on philosophy, not location. They don't have to move to Canada when someone like Trump gets elected; they just fill out a form, like I did when I switched to Independent. Maybe they're good kids because they can go anywhere they want whenever they want. But if the governmental system works so well — if switching Hives is more meaningful than switching political parties — why are they teetering on the brink of war?

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Bridger doesn't wear a tracker, but he's a-human: Mycroft says he's God incarnate. Saladin, who also wears none, they call inhuman.

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In this world nothing is wild and no one is free.

The child Bridger is the least interesting character in the book.

Mycroft Canner spends the entire novel trying to convince me that the "miracle child" is real, and it's not that I don't believe it —

It's just —

In this world people fly around the globe anytime the whim strikes them, live on the Moon, terraform Mars, keep genetically-engineered pterodactyls as pets, prune the brains of 8-year-old children so their synapses become one with computer software, fall in love with animated dolls and, not least, comb through DNA databases to create "perfect" humans to run the world —

A 13-year-old's ability to bring toy soldiers to life doesn't seem more miraculous than these other wonders. It does not seem to me the one thing, of all these things, which proves that God exists.

Ada Palmer's Too Like the Lightning is set 400 years in the future in a post-gender world. There's plenty of sex but there's no gender: overtly gendered clothing is taboo, gendered pronouns are perverse. People use clothing and gesture to signal their allegiances, their group membership, but never gender.

At least that's what our narrator, Mycroft, tells us. (Mycroft takes "unreliable narrator" to an extreme.)

So there's no gender in this future, but because Mycroft is deliberately mimicking an 18th-century style of writing, in this narrative we'll see gendered pronouns, and please forgive me, I know it's perverse but it's appropriate, I'm sorry! — It's a very clever technique. When I read in reviews that Ada had done this I was afraid it would read like a stunt and annoy me before chapter four, but in fact I love it. It's my favorite aspect of the book.

In Chapter the First, Mycroft speaks directly to the reader, and so uses the pronouns "I" and "you": "If I am properly to follow the style I have chosen, I must, at the book's outset, describe myself, my background and qualification, and tell you by what chance or Providence it is that the answers you seek are in my hands."

Eighteenth century writing style, author is clearly arrogant and yet behaves abjectly before a social superior, name is Mycroft Canner: I pictured him quite clearly: sitting at a writing desk in a room where firelight flickers against gleaming wooden floors, sitting erect, oh-so-serious expression on his face, flicking back the lace around his wrists to keep it from staining with ink.

In the next chapter we meet many new people, all of whom are indicated as either "he" or "she" in the narrator's voice, but referred to as "they" in dialog, as in: "A person stopped by. They left you a note." It's not jarring; I actually read it as a gentle chiding. Oh yeah! No gender in the future! Forget gender, you 21st-century barbarian! But then Mycroft attacks an intruder who's a threat to a child in the household — pins him by the throat — and even though no one has ever referred to Mycroft as "he," for me his gender was fixed.

But the text wore away at my perception. It was all those "they"s, reminding me over and over that these people don't see gender. Then there's a point where Mycroft decides he shouldn't have been referring to Carlyle as "he" all this time: Carlyle is too loving and nurturing to be male. And so Mycroft switches to calling Carlyle "she." And I realized: Mycroft isn't male, either! Mycroft is little and vulnerable and protective, quick to cry, and there's this scene where she's sitting on the floor of her apartment, scraping up some melted plastic, which is just feminine somehow. From that moment forward I saw Mycroft as a woman and everything made more sense. Given the way the other characters interact with her, and the way she sees herself in the world: definitely a woman. Even when I learned about some awful things she had done in her late teens (spoiler, I won't give details) which are, in our society, done almost exclusively by males, I pictured Mycroft as female and sent kudos to Ada for her cleverness.

Then Mycroft meets an old lover and this happens: "We ravished each other as best we could in those precious seconds ... our rising sexes all but touching through the clothes we did not have time to open."

Huh. Male.

It's so well done! It was like a therapy session. I'll be contemplating my concept of gender for a long time.

Writers I respect have given Ada Palmer's 2016 Too Like the Lightning rave reviews, and I enjoy & admire her blog; but I delayed reading the book for over a year because I knew it would be a deep, dark rabbit hole —

but now I've started it —

and it's made me so mad.

Utopia?!

Four hundred years from now the boundaries of the world have been erased by cheap, autonomous, super-speed flying cars, and people work only 20 hours a week and anti-aging drugs keep them biologically 20 until they're 65, and there hasn't been a war for three centuries.

And yet this world is awful.

Everyone there wears a "tracker," always. It's a Google Glass, basically, with a single carrier and infinite range and it appears to be attuned to thoughts, or something, so people never have to dial or type or scroll: you can only tell they're no longer present by the far-off look in their eyes. The data the tracker collects is instantly shareable; a person can log into another another's tracker and, despite being miles apart, they can experience the sunset together. A wife can whisper in her husband's ear. But the wife's enemies can whisper in his ear, too. So can — and does — the ever-present news. So can the police. So can 9-1-1, which gets alerted when a person's heart rate elevates. And if one's tracker is off for five days, by law search & rescue begins.

And the cars! The cars combined with a governmental system that separates citizenship from geography has created unimaginable mobility. Live in Seattle, work in Valparaiso, take an evening class in Shaolin; hey friend let's meet for lunch at this new place I found in Jakarta! but —

In the book this has either made every place exactly the same as everywhere else or it's ruined people's ability to see differences. Nobody seems to notice where they are, except as a statement of allegiance — the French love Paris because they're French and the French love Paris — but they don't care if they're surrounded by ponderosas or olive trees; they don't care if that's a robin's call or a nightingale's; they don't even notice humidity nor rain nor heat nor wind nor the difference between summer sunlight and winter sunlight.

In the same way that the trackers would disrupt your ability to think consecutive thoughts — to daydream or meditate — this world-hopping would destroy your ability to form a relationship with a landscape because you'd never see it move through time: not only winter-spring-summer-fall but also dawn-noon-twilight-dusk.

That's awful.

I got mad because in all the reviews I've read, in all the Reddit discussions over whether this society is a utopia or not, no one has commented on this.

Are people even today indifferent to ponderosas?

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The only book I would classify as utopia is Ursula LeGuin's Always Coming Home, which begins like this:

"Stone Telling is my name. It has come to me of my own choosing, because I have a story to tell of where I went when I was young; but now I go nowhere, sitting like a stone in this place, in this ground, in this Valley. I have come where I was going.

"My House is the Blue Clay, my household the High Porch of Sinshan.

..."In Sinshan babies' names often come from birds, since they are messengers. In the month before my mother bore me, an owl came every night to the oak trees called Gairga outside the windows of High Porch House, on the north side, and sang the owl's song there; so my first name was North Owl."

Sigh. Now I feel better.

"Science is right next to me," Blake said, apropos of nothing. We were driving back home from a loop around town (errands); Harry Potter & the Goblet of Fire sat in his lap. He and his sister had paused an argument to share bits of beef jerky, and he spoke between bites.

"Not science," I said. "Sasha."

But he was being serious.

"No, no, I know what you mean. Science explains how the world works, so in that sense you're surrounded by science."

"No, that's not right," Sasha piped up. "Science asks questions."

"Right," Blake said. "And religion gives answers."

(Found in my drafts folder.)

"Is this Earth?" he cried, for things had changed abruptly.

"Yes, this is Earth," said the one beside him, "nor are you out of it. In Zambia men are rolling down hills inside barrels as training for space flight. Israel and Egypt have defoliated each other's deserts. The Reader's Digest has bought a controlling interest in the United States of America/General Mills combine. The population of the Earth is increasing by 30 billion every Thursday. Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis will marry Mao Tse-Tung on Saturday, in search of security; and Russia has contaminated Mars with bread mold."

"Why then," said he, "nothing has changed."

Excerpt from Ursula K. LeGuin's short story "A Trip to the Head" as reprinted in The Wind's Twelve Quarters, 1975.

She cracks me up.

ISFDB says this story was originally published in 1970, the year before I was born. So she also makes me feel quite, quite young.

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Ms. LeGuin has a list of links to good background information on the so-called Oregon Standoff on her site. Go here and scroll to the section "New on the Website".

She also wrote a blog post in October with what is, I believe, the text of a speech she gave to celebrate the 15th Anniversary of the Steens Mountain Wilderness. In it she says, "It’s only too easy to antagonize 'the locals' by appearing to dismiss their hard-earned local knowledge or giving the impression that the aesthetic emotions or escapist yearnings of hikers, campers, birders, tourists are more valuable than the ranchers’ relationship to the land and the living they and their animals earn from it. Such antagonisms can be modified by patient listening on both sides, genuine conversation, working towards a mutual good. Sounds easy. It’s complicated."

**

I do love Ursula LeGuin. Even if she always puts her most misguided societies in volcano country.

My daughter's gecko has escaped his cage. A gecko is not as destructive as our other escaped pets (a gerbil once spent a week holed up in our speakers) but he's more difficult to find. He's the same beige as our walls and carpet, and he's silent and still and nocturnal.

To catch the gerbils we put out food. To catch Tokay we're setting up humidifiers. Poor little guy. I hope he doesn't end up like Ötzi.

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Blake berated his sister over this. I told him to stop. All caged creatures, I said, will find an opportunity to escape, even misleadingly immobile geckos.

And my son leapt from his chair and disappeared out the front door.

But then he came back in. "It's cold out there!"

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You guys. I cannot stop reading about events at the Malheur Wildlife Refuge. I'm so curious about the journalists that I'm tempted to drive over there.

What does the press think of it out there? It's really, really remote. From Bend heading east there is not a noticeable town for two hours, and even then you've only reached Hines (population 1500) and Burns (population 2500). Are they flying into Bend or Boise and renting vans? Where are they staying? Where are they eating? Where are they charging their phones?

My sister and I wrote a newsletter one summer. It was the truly, truly wonderful summer before my junior year of college & her sophomore year; we lived in a rented house in Ithaca; we worked a little, but mostly we were free to do exactly as we pleased --- and writing a newsletter was one thing that pleased us.

I know. We were wild.

I had a Mac Classic, the laptop of those days*, and a printer** and I loved to write and I'd interned at a place that taught me to use PageMaker*** and I was bored in that really luxurious youthful summer way: so my sister and I typed up a newsletter. We mailed**** it to our parents and little sister back home.

It was totally hilarious. No, really! It started all serious, you know, "The sisters announced today..." with a headline and byline and placeline, and then it would go on to say we'd eaten cereal for breakfast. Cheerios, of course, not Lucky Charms, because our parents raised us so well.

Yes: it was just like a blog. Not like Facebook or Twitter, those bastions of the one-liner: it was just like a blog.

I miss blogging.


* god, does anything date a person like technology? Before cell phones: after email but before the World Wide Web: therefore, 1991

** dot-matrix. Yep, there is an e-learning piece about a technology from my college years

*** in high school the yearbook staff learned PageMaker but I was on the newspaper staff, and we literally pasted the paper together

**** no, that's not a typo. We mailed it. I told you, it was nineteen ninety one

A robin built a nest in the crook of our silver maple tree. I didn't know it until I heard her screeching and saw her dive-bomb a western scrub jay that had landed in the nest. I dashed over there and stomped my feet and screeched at him, too, and he flew off.

Afterward the robin flew to a nearby fence, where she perched, still squawking. I thought she was yelling at me, so I went away – to watch her surreptitiously. After awhile she stopped shouting. She stayed there on the fence post.

So I climbed the tree to check on her eggs.

Of which there were none.

The robin stayed on the fence for quite awhile. She looked a little lost -- at loose ends -- as if she wasn't sure what to do next or where to go. The gerbils are like that after one of their fellows dies: lonely and not sure why.

My husband has been sick for awhile so I'm making him a restorative beef soup. I started it this morning on the theory that if it simmered all day, the meat would become soft and digestible and delicious and the broth full of vitamins. (I firmly believe in food as medicine.) But in the last little while the wind has kicked up. It creates just enough of a breeze within the house that on simmer, my gas burner sputters and sputters. I could hear it sputtering even upstairs, at my desk. So I ran downstairs and turned the heat up higher and let the soup boil while I went back up to work; then, worried it had all evaporated, I ran downstairs and turned it off and let it cool awhile as I went back to working; and then, worried it might go bad, I ran downstairs again to turn the heat on again and let it boil again; and so on: every half hour running up and down the stairs to attend to my now imperious restorative soup.

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For Alejna -- a list:

If you google "tools dictate behavior," you get pages with the following titles:

• Orangutans' culture dictates their behavior
• Do neurons dictate behavior?
• Do genes dictate behavior?
• Do you let your type dictate your behavior?
• Does your birth date dictate your behavior?
• How sporting rules dictate behavior